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Notes from the Editors
September 2026 (Volume 78, Number 4)
Taking as a starting point two classic works of the mid-nineteenth century—Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil; or the Two Nations and Frederick Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England—this month's "Notes from the Editors" explores the way both authors articulated the plight of workers in their own era, drawing key parallels to our own time. The similarities are particularly conspicuous when examining the so-called affordability crisis, exposing the regime of social murder that accompanies the increasing polarization of economic life.
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Article
José Carlos Mariátegui and Local Traditions of Struggle
The relationship between Marxism and other revolutionary traditions is a key question for our time. If we approach the issue incorrectly, we risk Eurocentrism and underrecognizing Marxism's role in the Global South contexts where it is most vital and active. This article examines and extends José Carlos Mariátegui's dialectical approach to the issue, which demonstrates how Marxism is not diluted but strengthened through engagement with the thought and practice of existing struggles, while those struggles can, in turn, gain greater depth and groundedness through the same relationship.
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Article
Beyond Scarcity: Thomas Sowell and the Limits of Neoclassical Economics
Through the work of neoclassical economist Thomas Sowell, Elliot Goodell Ugalde dissects the orthodox view that takes for granted that scarcity is at the center of economic life. In a world of various kinds of surpluses, Goodell argues, the idea that scarcity is the only organizing principle of our economic is inadequate to describe the complex interactions of institutions, history, and social power that make up economic organization under capitalism.
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Reprise
The Economics of Destruction
In this 1980 talk by Joan Robinson, first published in MR in 1983, the economist painted a stark picture of global arms race fueled by military capitalism and imperialism. The important question," she urged, "is not whether the rate of inflation is high or low or can be brought under control but whether our generation will succeed in destroying the world…. Economics should begin to address the important issue of our impending doom."
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Review
Radical Jewish Tradition
Paul Buhle The Radical Jewish Tradition by Donny Glickstein and Janey Stone. The book, Buhle writes, is a window onto "the antinomies of nineteenth-century Jewish life"—including the growing movement against Zionism and for socialism among Eastern European Jews. This authors, Buhle notes, also tells the story of Jewish communists in Britain, the United States, and beyond, taking into account the wide sweep of Jewish left activity globally, situating the present struggles against genocide in Palestine squarely within the legacy of radical Jews everywhere.
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Introduction
The Global Structural Crisis of Capital
John Bellamy Foster introduces our special summer issue on the "Structural Crisis of Capital," illuminating its four main characteristics as first outlined by István Mészáros in Marx's Theory of Alienation. Capital, Foster says, has found itself in a position akin to Lucian's sorcerer's apprentice: futilely attempting to control a runaway system that he had himself created, accumulating not only contradictions but outright catastrophe—with globe-spanning consequences.
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Article
On the Economic Crisis of Capitalism
Considering the "Structural Crisis of Capital" from the perspective of economics, Prabhat Patnaik sheds light on two major aspects that have risen to prominence in our current conjuncture. The first, rampant stagnation and unemployment, is clear and undeniable. The second, particular to the capitalism of the late twentieth century and the shedding of colonies on which imperial nations depended for wealth is particularly salient to Trump's economic strategy of economic recolonization not only through soft power, but direct military action.
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Article
Between the Times: Privatized Keynesianism, Permanent Catastrophe, and the Task of an Economy of Social Production
"Old-style neoliberalism," write Riccardo Bellofiore and Giovanna Vertova "is dead, or at least gravely ill. The new paradigm that may replace it has not yet been born or is not yet recognizable. In the middle, between the times, lies what we have proposed to call the permanent catastrophe: a regime in which capitalist responses in catastrophic form have become the norm, in which crises are no longer overcome but accumulate."
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Article
U.S. Imperialism Resurgent
It is quite evident, Costas Lapavitsas begins, that the world is currently ensnared in geopolitical turmoil, perhaps for over a decade. In this article, Lapavitsas provides insight into the inseparable and interlocking mechanisms of dollar dominance and imperialism backed by the escalatory militarism of the second Trump administration. As Lapavitsas notes: "The dollar and the F-35—monetary coercion and military power—are two moments of a single structure of domination."
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Article
Monetary Policy and Capitalism
Jan Toporowski explains our contemporary age of "monetary policy dominance": the era in which the setting of short-term interest rates by the central banks is seen as the key instrument for regulating economic activity. This, however, does not reflect an ironclad law of the business cycle but, rather, a set of assumptions that underscores the dependence of capitalism on the accumulation of capital itself. This in turn obscures deeper truths about the effectiveness of monetary policy on the daily lives of the working class.
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Article
Why Can China Resist Financialization?
Over the last half-century, the "financial explosion"—manifest in the unrestrained expansion of financialization and its tools and institutions—has fundamentally reshaped the global economy, impacting countries throughout the Global North and South. China, however, has proven to be a distinctive case. Xiaolu Kuang, Zhi Li, and Fusheng Xie probe the question of how and why China has managed to maintain its emphasis on production above finance, and the development all above the accumulation of capital.
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Article
Imperialism in a Full World: Neomercantilism and the Return of the Zero-Sum Game
Since the wane of mercantilism in Europe, conceptions of wealth, trade, and productivity have also changed: from one of a zero-sum game reliant only on the productivity of land, to one of the potential for positive-sum wealth created by industry, and, now, to the zero-sum neomercantilism necessitated in a world of resource depletion, where the earth is pushed to its biophysical limits. But the response to this crisis does not have to be further fortification—it could also be a world that organizes itself within the metabolic limitations of nature.
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Article
Value Chains in the Digital Age: Labor Exploitation and Systemic Ecocide
In order to comprehend the environmental crisis that goes hand-in-hand with the "Structural Crisis of Capital," we must also understand the nature of global value chains and how they contribute to environmental degradation and worker exploitation on a global level. Benjamin Selwyn elucidates how global value chains and digitalization sit within a "conjoined dynamic of labor-exploitative accumulation and ecological expropriation."
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New! Chris dePloeg’s “The Exterminating Empire”
APPEARANCES: Just hours after its release, the first interview with Chris De Ploeg has already gone live! Adnan Husain‘s Office Hours 39 Taking the ongoing genocide in Palestine as a... READ MORE
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Gabriel Rockhill’s “Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?”
The latest: Rockhill does not claim, as he was immediately accused of doing, that “Western Marxism” was an “invention” of the CIA. But he reconstructs how the integration of this theoretical output into the “intellectual world war” against socialism was organized and conceptually thought through. He shows how far this integration went in specific cases and why it was logically consistent in terms of content. It was precisely because the “Western Marxists” tended “to support imperialism, or at least to make it acceptable.” It is to Rockhill’s credit that, drawing on the framework of a Marxist history of ideas, a discipline that has largely died out in the German-speaking world, he undertook the attempt to develop a comprehensive conception of this “world war.”
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New: “‘Black Marxism’: A Marxist Critique”, by August Nimtz
The latest: "Nimtz’ insightful review has languished for forty years in even more obscurity than Robinson’s book, until it has now been reprinted..."
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New: Matthew Stanley’s “The Ragged Edge of Freedom”
The latest, from Paul Buhle: "Abolitionists and social reformers of all kinds, with a wide Yankee following augmented by many recent German immigrants, sought to take things beyond the uneasy accommodation of white populations to each other across existing political lines. In Wisconsin and in Chicago most notably, these would include “Abe’s Boys” enrolling in the army of the Union. Not so in the Southern Illinois, two hours’ drive from my hometown. The whites who immigrated northward from the near South, largely uneducated and lacking skills, came to be considered almost a species in themselves...."
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